Week 7: Promotion-driven development

Promotion packets, Google's product graveyard, the multitask model with a launch in it, and how to tell a rebuild the users needed from one the packet needed.

20 April 2027

Why it worksA packet counts launches; the multitask result says the countable task crowds out the rest, and maintenance is the rest.

A promotion packet is a list of things launched. Maintaining a system that works, for years, for thousands of users, produces nothing that fits in it. Replacing that system with a new one produces a launch, a design document, an announcement and a packet, and the cost of migrating everyone off the old one is paid later, by other people, in reviews that are not yours.

Steve Yegge’s 2020 essay on Google Cloud’s deprecation policy is the best known account of what this does to a company from the outside: products that appear, are announced, and are abandoned once the people who launched them have been promoted off them. From the inside it looks like a rational response to the rubric. Week 2 gave you the model: two tasks, one countable and one not, and effort flowing to the counted one. A launch is countable. Keeping a system alive for its users is not, so the packet cannot hold it, so nobody is paid to do it, so it is done badly or not at all. This is the most expensive version of the multitask result, and it is still cheap for the person doing it. The bill goes to the users who migrate and to the engineer who inherits the old system after the launch team has been promoted off it.

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Teaching team